N. Scott Momaday famous quotes

03-18-2025

We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, and that we are. The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined.
-- N. Scott Momaday

#Destiny #Imagination #Tragedy
I wonder if, in the dark night of the sea, the octopus dreams of me.
-- N. Scott Momaday

#Dream #Dark #Night
Anything is bearable if you can make a story out of it.
-- N. Scott Momaday

#History #Stories #Bearable
Coyotes have the gift of seldom being seen; they keep to the edge of vision and beyond, loping in and out of cover on the plains and highlands. And at night, when the whole world belongs to them, they parley at the river with the dogs, their higher, sharper voices full of authority and rebuke. They are an old council of clowns, and they are listened to.
-- N. Scott Momaday

#Dog #Night #Voice
Writing engenders in us certain attitudes toward language. It encourages us to take words for granted. Writing has enabled us to store vast quantities of words indefinitely. This is advantageous on the one hand but dangerous on the other. The result is that we have developed a kind of false security where language is concerned, and our sensitivity to language has deteriorated. And we have become in proportion insensitive to silence.
-- N. Scott Momaday

#Attitude #Writing #Hands
For the storyteller, for the arrowmaker, language does indeed represent the only chance for survival.
-- N. Scott Momaday

#Survival #Doe #Chance
A word has power in and of itself. It comes from nothing into sound and meaning; it gives origin to all things.
-- N. Scott Momaday

#Giving #Sound
Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience; to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder upon it, and dwell upon it.
-- N. Scott Momaday

#Home #Men #Giving
Words were medicine; they were magic and invisible. They came from nothing into sound and meaning. They were beyond price; they could neither be bought nor sold.
-- N. Scott Momaday

#Magic #Invisible
Once in his life, a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth, I believe. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of noon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk.
-- N. Scott Momaday

#Believe #Men #Hands
I am interested in the way that we look at a given landscape and take possession of it in our blood and brain. None of us lives apart from the land entirely; such an isolation is unimaginable. If we are to realize and maintain our humanity, we must come to a moral comprehension of earth and air as it is perceived in the long turn of seasons and of years.
-- N. Scott Momaday

#Air #Blood #Years
The turn of the century was the lowest point for the devastation of Indian culture by disease and persecution, and it's a wonder to me that they survived it and have not only maintained their identity, but are actually growing stronger in some ways. The situation is still very bad, especially in certain geographical areas, but there are more Indians going to school, more Indians becoming professional people, more Indians assuming full responsibility in our society. We have a long way to go, but we're making great strides.
-- N. Scott Momaday

#School #Responsibility #People
He used both hands when he made the bear. Imagine a bear proceeding from the hands of God.
-- N. Scott Momaday

#Hands #Bears #Imagine
There is a great good in returning to a landscape that has had extraordinary meaning in one's life. It happens that we return to such places in our minds irresistibly. There are certain villages and towns, mountains and plains that, having seen them walked in them lived in them even for a day, we keep forever in the mind's eye. They become indispensable to our well-being; they define us, and we say, I am who I am because I have been there, or there.
-- N. Scott Momaday

#Eye #Who I Am #Forever
To encounter the sacred is to be alive at the deepest center of human existence. Sacred places are the truest definitions of the earth; they stand for the earth immediately and forever; they are its flags and shields. If you would know the earth for what it really is, learn it through its sacred places. At Devilâ€™s Tower or Canyon de Chelly or the Cahokia Mounds, you touch the pulse of the living planet; you feel its breath upon you. You become one with a spirit that pervades geologic time and space.
-- N. Scott Momaday

#Space #Forever #Devil
They have assumed the names and gestures of their enemies, but have held on to their own, secret souls; and in this there is a resistance and an overcoming, a long outwaiting.
-- N. Scott Momaday

#Names #Long #Soul
To look upon that landscape in the early morning, with the sun at your back, is to lose the sense of proportion.
-- N. Scott Momaday

#Morning #Landscape #Sun
I sometimes think the contemporary white American is more culturally deprived than the Indian.
-- N. Scott Momaday

#Thinking #White #Sometimes
I have a pretty good knowledge of the Indian world by virtue of living on several different reservations and being exposed to several different cultures and languages.
-- N. Scott Momaday

#World #Different #Culture
Indians are marvelous storytellers. In some ways, that oral tradition is stronger than the written tradition.
-- N. Scott Momaday

#Stronger #Way #Oral Tradition
My father was a painter and he taught art. He once said to me, 'I never knew an Indian child who could not draw.'
-- N. Scott Momaday

#Art #Children #Father
The highest human purpose is always to reinvent and celebrate the sacred.
-- N. Scott Momaday

#Religion #Purpose #Sacred
If you believe in the power of words, you can bring about physical changes in the universe.
-- N. Scott Momaday

#Believe #Power Of Words #If You Believe
Your imagination comes to life, and this, you think, is where Creation was begun.
-- N. Scott Momaday

#Thinking #Imagination #Creation
In the beginning was the word, and it was spoken.
-- N. Scott Momaday
There was only the dark infinity in which nothing was. And something happened. At the distance of a star something happened, and everything began. The Word did not come into being, but it was. It did not break upon the silence, but it was older than the silence and the silence was made of it.
-- N. Scott Momaday

#Stars #Distance #Dark
It's a landscape that has to be seen to be believed. And as I say on occasion, it may have to be believed in order to be seen.
-- N. Scott Momaday

#Order #Landscape #May

You may also like: